Category Archives: Mystery Monday

If you love a good mystery then you should check out this week’s spotlight!

Title: Hemlock Island by Kelley Armstrong
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery, Thriller, Horror, Paranormal
Length: 296 pages

Summary:

A standalone horror novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong.

Laney Kilpatrick has been renting her vacation home to strangers. The invasion of privacy gives her panic attacks, but it’s the only way she can keep her beloved Hemlock Island, the only thing she owns after a pandemic-fueled divorce. But broken belongings and campfires that nearly burn down the house have escalated to bloody bones, hex circles, and now, terrified renters who’ve fled after finding blood and nail marks all over the guest room closet, as though someone tried to claw their way out…and failed.

When Laney shows up to investigate with her teenaged niece in tow, she discovers that her ex, Kit, has also been informed and is there with Jayla, his sister and her former best friend. Then Sadie, another old high school friend, charters over with her brother, who’s now a cop.

There are tensions and secrets, whispers in the woods, and before long, the discovery of a hand poking up from the earth. Then the body that goes with it… But by that time, someone has taken off with their one and only means off the island, and they’re trapped with someone—or something—that doesn’t want them leaving the island alive.

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If you love a good mystery then you should check out this week’s spotlight!

Title: Good Bad Girl by Alice Feeney
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Genre: Contemporary, Domestic Thriller
Length: 310 pages

Summary:

Sometimes bad things happen to good people, so good people have to do bad things.

Our Queen of Twists, bestselling author of Daisy Darker and Rock Paper Scissors Alice Feeney, returns with another thrilling mystery filled with drama and her trademark surprises.

Twenty years after a baby is stolen from a stroller, a woman is murdered in a care home. The two crimes are somehow linked, and a good bad girl may be the key to discovering the truth.

Edith may have been tricked into a nursing home, but at eighty-years-young, she’s planning her escape. Patience works there, cleaning messes and bonding with Edith, a kindred spirit. But Patience is lying to Edith about almost everything.

Edith’s own daughter, Clio, won’t speak to her. And someone new is about to knock on Clio’s door…and their intentions aren’t good.

With every reason to distrust each other, the women must solve a mystery with three suspects, two murders, and one victim. If they do, they might just find out what happened to the baby who disappeared, the mother who lost her, and the connections that bind them.

In the style of Daisy Darker and Rock Paper Scissors, Good Bad Girl is a thriller in which nobody can be trusted and the twists come fast and furious.

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If you love a good mystery then you should check out this week’s spotlight!

Title: The Trade Off by Sandie Jones
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Genre: Contemporary, Suspense, Psychological Thriller
Length: 300 pages

Summary:

From the New York Times bestselling author of the Reese’s Book Club Pick The Other Woman comes The Trade Off, an electrifying new novel of suspense that begs the question: Would you tell a story, if you knew it was a lie? Or tell the truth and sleep at night?

For Stella, deputy editor of The Globe, the choice has always been clear. It doesn’t matter how low she has to stoop—getting the best story is what she’s built her reputation on.

For Jess, The Globe’s rookie reporter, the story stops when the truth does. But she knows that the dirty tricks of the tabloids will be hard to overturn.

And when a celebrity is hounded by The Globe and pays the ultimate price, Jess wonders just how much Stella and the paper are responsible.

Determined to show the world what the tabloid is capable of, Jess will do whatever it takes to uncover the truth, but she needs to watch her back, because someone else is prepared to kill to bury it.

RISK or REWARD. JUSTICE or REVENGE. INNOCENCE or GUILT.

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If you love a good mystery then you should check out this week’s spotlight!

Title: A Killer in the Family by Gytha Lodge
DCI Jonah Sheens #5
Publisher: Random House
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery, Suspense
Length: 405 pages

Summary:

A woman uploads her DNA online, searching for her father—but the man who contacts her is Detective Chief Inspector Jonah Sheens. From the acclaimed author of Little Sister, this endlessly twisty crime novel asks: What might a family do to protect or expose a serial killer in its midst?

When the police found the first body, left on a bonfire in the forest, they worried it had the hallmarks of a serial killer.

Now, as they find the second, they know for sure.

Panic about the “Bonfire Killer” quickly spreads through the sedate suburban area of Southampton. Women are urged not to travel alone at night, and constant vigilance is encouraged among the local residents. But single mom Aisling Cooley has a lot to distract her: two beloved teenage sons and a quest to find her long-lost father, whom she hasn’t seen since she was a teenager.

After much debate, she decides to upload her DNA to an ancestry website. When she gets a match she is filled with an anxious excitement that her questions about her father’s disappearance from her life might finally be answered.

But to her horror, it’s not her father who’s found her. It’s a detective.

And they say her DNA is a close match for the Bonfire Killer. . . .

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If you love a good mystery then you should check out this week’s spotlight!

Title: The Last One by Will Dean
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Genre: Contemporary, Domestic/Pschological Thriller, Mystery
Length: 444 pages

Summary:

An unputdownable locked-room thriller about family, trust, and survival from the acclaimed author of the “utterly thrilling” (Lisa Jewell, #1 New York Times bestselling author) First Born.

When Caz steps onboard the exclusive cruise liner RMS Atlantica, it’s the start of a vacation of a lifetime with her new love, Pete. On their first night they explore the ship, eat, dance, make friends, but when Caz wakes the next morning, Pete is missing.

And when she walks out into the corridor, all the cabin doors are open. To her horror, she soon realizes that the ship is completely empty. No passengers, no crew, nobody but her. The Atlantica is steaming into the mid-Atlantic and Caz is the only person on board. But that’s just the beginning of the terrifying journey she finds herself trapped on in this white-knuckled mystery.

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If you love a good mystery then you should check out this week’s spotlight!

Title: The Bitter Past by Bruce Borgos
Porter Beck Book One
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Genre: Contemporary, Historical (50s), Mystery, Thriller
Length: 310 pages

Summary:

In the tradition of Craig Johnson and C. J. Box, Bruce Borgos’s The Bitter Past begins a compelling series set in the high desert of Nevada featuring Sheriff Porter Beck…

Porter Beck is the sheriff in the high desert of Nevada, north of Las Vegas. Born and raised there, he left to join the Army, where he worked in Intelligence, deep in the shadows in far off places. Now he’s back home, doing the same lawman’s job his father once did, before his father started to develop dementia. All is relatively quiet in this corner of the world, until an old, retired FBI agent is found killed. He was brutally tortured before he was killed and clues at the scene point to a mystery dating back to the early days of the nuclear age. If that wasn’t strange enough, a current FBI agent shows up to help Beck’s investigation.

In a case that unfolds in the past (the 1950s) and the present, it seems that a Russian spy infiltrated the nuclear testing site and now someone is looking for that long-ago, all-but forgotten person, who holds the key to what happened then and to the deadly goings on now.

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